Cheshire

by Charles E. Kelsey

If you study any of these churches carefully you will see that the style was once again changing. Probably the first thing you will note will be the change in the patterns of the windows. The mullions which divide the lights are carried right up to the crown of the windows instead of branching off to right or left in flowing curves. This is the chief feature from which the new style has received the name of Perpendicular.

The Perpendicular builders of the latter half of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth centuries found their windows growing to such a size that they had to strengthen them with cross-bars called transoms. Thus the windows, as in the west front of Astbury and the south transept of Chester Cathedral, for instance, present the appearance of a number of rectangles placed side by side and piled one above another. The crown of the windows are also now flattened until they hardly appear to be pointed at all.

The clerestories of the Perpendicular churches were filled with rows of windows until the whole length of the wall was almost continuous glass, as at Malpas and Astbury. When Bibles and Church services began to be printed more light was needed, for people went to church to read as well as to listen.

The doorways, like the windows, have changed with the times. The heads are flattened and covered with a square moulded hood. The corner spaces between the arch and the hood are called spandrels, and are generally filled in with carved foliage or shields. At the sides are often niches for the images of saints, or moulded panels. The door of the Rivers Chapel at Macclesfield is a beautiful specimen of Perpendicular architecture.

The walls of Perpendicular churches are generally surmounted by a parapet which runs round the whole length of a church, as at Malpas. Sometimes the stone work of the parapet is pierced with panel-shaped slits or ornamented with rows of quatrefoils. Panels appear on the buttresses of Gawsworth Church.

But the great glory of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century churches are the tall and massive square towers. These are built in stages separated from one another by a narrow projecting course of stones or by bands of quatrefoils. The name of the builder often appears on the tower. Round the tower of Mobberley Church runs a Latin inscription bearing the names of John Talbot and Margaret his wife, the patrons of the church, and Richard Plat the master-mason. On the towers of Macclesfield and Gawsworth Churches are carved rows of shields bearing the arms of different lords of the manor. Like the body of the church, the tower is generally crowned with an embattled parapet with pinnacles at the four corners.

Perpendicular Tower, Handley. Fifteenth Century

In the carved foliage of one of the capitals in the nave of Chester Cathedral are the letters S. R. They are the initials of Abbot Simon Ripley, one of the greatest of fifteenth-century builders in Cheshire. He rebuilt the upper parts of the nave and south transept of the Abbey Church, and planned the central tower, which was finished by the next abbot. Simon Ripley also built the old tower and gateway at Saighton Grange, which had been the residence of the Abbots of S. Werburgh ever since the time of Hugh Lupus.

Many of the village churches of Cheshire were built on the sites of former churches, and often a portion of the older building remains to prove this. The Norman font at Grappenhall and the little Norman window at Woodchurch are all that is left to prove that churches existed here before the present buildings were erected. In such churches you can often trace the successive buildings and rebuildings, alterations and additions that have been made from time to time. A single church may indeed show the chief features of all the styles from the time of the Conqueror to the Civil War. At Prestbury you may see a Norman doorway in the little chapel in the churchyard; in the chancel of the church is a window of pure Early English, and in the nave a pillar of the same period. There are Decorated windows in the aisles, and a Perpendicular window at the east end.